


This Is How You Will Grow Up

by Margo_Kim



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Growing Up, Kid Fic, POV Second Person, Pre-Canon, Tumblr: jaegercon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-10
Updated: 2013-08-10
Packaged: 2017-12-22 23:49:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/919486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Mourn. Learn to mourn the same way you learned to walk, to talk, to run, to jump, to cut, to fight. You were born crying, but mourning you must learn. All your short life you have walked on the surface of the Earth. Now it rests upon your slender back, and your feet flail at the black and the stars.</i> Short fic on the last days of Mako's childhood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Is How You Will Grow Up

**Author's Note:**

> Written for trope bingo's "kidfic" and jaegercon's "pre-canon" prompts.

Mourn. Learn to mourn the same way you learned to walk, to talk, to run, to jump, to cut, to fight. You were born crying, but mourning you must learn. All your short life you have walked on the surface of the Earth. Now it rests upon your slender back, and your feet flail at the black and the stars. There are so many ways to be crushed. You must learn how to cry without ripping your lungs out, learn how to hurt without bleeding yourself dry. All your life you have lived in love, that soft cocoon that asked so little of you. Those who loved you are dead, and so now you must be more than beloved. Mourn, and through mourning, transform yourself into something stronger than grief. Forge your metal body, your nuclear heart, so big and grand that you can forget there’s flesh in there at all.

Learn. You have always loved to learn, and now it will save your life. You read in a book how sharks must move or die. That could be you. Dying is not an option, not until your work is done, so you must move, and education is what pushes you forward, what you can push forward towards. Not math, not writing, not history, not the things you once thought you needed to know. Two things are true at once: The world has been forever changed, nothing at all has ever changed. Monsters stalk the Earth, and warriors knock them back. You learn to tell the old story new ways. Underneath your blanket, by the light of your flashlight, you swap out your manga about magic little girls who save the world with love for schematics of the Mark One models. You don’t understand everything, but you understand enough, and though no adorable chibi or talking animal will come to you with the gift of destiny and the powers to go with it, you have destiny enough already, and in these blueprints lie all the powers you need. The hero still wears their armor, still swings their sword. You must simply learn which armor, which sword.

Remember. The well-meaning adults in your life, the ones that are left, will not tell you this. Or they will tell you the clean version, the safe version, the one meant for little girls who didn’t stumble crying through the streets of Tokyo as the world crashed down around them. They tell you to remember the good. Remember the love. Remember the soft and light and then to move on. They would stitch you up, but when they aren’t looking, rip out your sutures with your teeth. Bleed. Though too much loss will drain you dry, though the wound is as wide as the Rift, you have to bleed when the poison still festers. Bleed because your world bleeds. Because your nation bleeds. Because your family doesn’t and never will again. They will fear your crimson anger, the well-meaning adults, and that is good. You will have to get good at scaring things far bigger than you.

Grow. Your feet will never again fit into your new red shoes. Your nice blue jacket will grow tight across your solid shoulders. When you get your period for the first time, in one of the ladies’ rooms of the Tokyo Shatterdome, try not to panic and cry. When you end up panicking and crying, try not to scream, “I’m bleeding!” to the hero who saved you and came back to save you again. In the moment between hearing and understanding, his heart will seize like he is dying, and he will remember that feeling so many years from now, when the time comes that you should be a pilot. In that moment, he will understand that he loves you.

But you are still bleeding and when he falls silent, when he leaves, do not cry harder. This is what you should do instead—when he returns after marching through the Shatterdome in full uniform to thrust two boxes of tampons and three boxes of pads at you because he didn’t know which brands or sizes were best, you should dry your wet face and smile. You are not dying. In truth, you are not even bleeding. This is no new wound. You lose nothing that you should not lose, and when you come out of the bathroom at last and find him sitting on the floor waiting for you, bow. Thank him. And when he waves it off and says, “I don’t need to give you the talk, do I?” do not blush as you laugh. But laugh. He will laugh too, and you will feel taller.

The man who saved you is not a god. You know that, through the evidence of your own eyes and his protestations. He is not a god, and you know that, but you’ll never _really_ believe he’s not. To you, he always has that shining halo behind him, even when he is cursing at the computer when it freezes up, even when he drinks juice from the carton and it dribbles down his front, even when he sighs and kneels and does up your laces one more time before you never seem to do them right. When he does this, you know he must not be a god. If he was, he’d know how you tug the knot free when he’s not looking just to see if he’ll tie it again. He does, he always does, and even if he is not a god, he is certainly a good, good man. (And who says the two things are incompatible?  Every jaeger, after all, is human at its heart.)

“You’re tricky,” he says one day, crouched at your feet. “Tricky and mean to a poor old ranger.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” you reply, and he winks as he double knots your laces.

One Saturday he lifts you up onto his shoulder so you can get a better view of Echo Saber flying home victorious, and you feel taller than the jaeger. “Someday this will be me,” you promise, and he squeezes your ankles.

“Someday,” he agrees. He agrees easier on the days when the jaegers win. “When you’re grownup.”

When he says this, do not protest. You’ll want to say, _I’m grownup now_ , but you never could lie to him. It seems like your childhood should have been crushed until the feet of Onibaba, but that terrible day did just the opposite. You still have a child’s fears and a child’s love and a child’s rage, and were you destined for smaller fights, these would serve you well. These would make you happy. But you have sharpened your grief to a knife’s point, and you will never be content to let it rust in its sheath. So you grow.

Rest your chin on his head. Wave to the heroes coming home and laugh as they wave back one fifty meter arm just for you. Here you are still, in the cocoon of love. The time comes that you must kick your way free, but not yet, not yet. The war clock of the Shatterdome counts the days and hours and minutes since your world changed. What will you be when it clanks down once more to zero, zero, zero? With all your instructions and plans and schematics, you still do not know. Life is trickier than that, you’ve learned.

But the war clock still runs, and the wounded world still spins, so you can do both as well. Today you are a giant on the shoulders of one who loves you, and you see the bright dawn as only children can. For you are a child yet. Despite everything, you are a child yet and the future, for now, still waits for you with hope clutched tight in its little hands.

 


End file.
